China's Minority Problem -- And Ours

October 2, 2009

China's 60th anniversary this week also marks 60 years of a volatile
relationship with its own minority populations. Now, if the region is to
stay stable, China must undo the damage Mao did.
BY CHRISTINA LARSON

Foreign Policy - September 30, 2009

On October 1, the People's Republic of China will mark its 60th anniversary
with the largest military parade in its history. The ruling Communist Party
is not commemorating 60 years of ideological stability and continuity,
however, but a period of speedy change and dramatic reversals.

Most of the major ideas that animate Beijing today are the opposite of those
found in Chairman Mao's Little Red Book: Communism as guiding economic
doctrine is out. Getting rich is glorious. Western decadence is not
threatening, but useful as an engine of China's export economy. And instead
of railing against the established powers of the developed world, China now
wants to join them.

Still, there is one way in which China's governance philosophy and
architecture remain largely unchanged from what Mao Zedong envisioned in the
1950s: minority affairs. And recent bloody riots in Xinjiang and Tibet are a
wake-up call that the system is fraying badly. Today Beijing should be
encouraging a dialogue about the sources of growing discontent, not placing
further bans on local media and minority religious observance, as it is
doing now. Rising unrest in China's western borderlands is an ominous sign,
not just for Beijing but for all of Asia.

Mao foresaw the challenge of managing minority concerns in western China,
but the solution he cooked up was no great leap forward. During China's
civil war in the 1940s, he lured China's ethnic minorities -- Tibetans,
Uighurs, and Hui Muslims, among others -- into fighting for the Red Army
with promises of independence if he prevailed. But once the war ended, Mao
retreated from talk of "independence" to talk of "autonomy," borrowing an
experimental concept from his northern neighbor, Joseph Stalin.

Today, China's main minority regions, including Xinjiang and Tibet, are
technically known as "autonomous regions." These regions, where historically
the population has been ethnically and culturally distinct from China's Han
majority, have been given the semblance of local stewardship. But decisions
are still made centrally, with the assumption that Beijing knows best --
similar to the Soviet system of local satraps who took their orders from
Moscow. As Drew Thompson, director of China studies at the Nixon Center in
Washington, says, "The phrase 'autonomous regions' rings a little hollow."

With the USSR, of course, the system worked until it didn't: When Mikhail
Gorbachev finally took the lid off, it revealed the extent to which Soviet
policies had deepened regional and ethnic divisions -- failing at the goal
of forging a shared national identity. There's no sign that China will see a
happier outcome. "In the long term, this is not a very stable arrangement
for China," says the Hudson Institute's Richard Weitz.

It's also not a stable arrangement for any country with a security interest
in Central Asia -- which is to say, much of the world. As Weitz explains:
"China's two most sensitive ethnic areas are also its two most significant
regions for geopolitical reasons: Xinjiang is a Muslim region, and it's very
important as China's gateway to Central Asia. And Tibet is a buffer zone for
China's tense relationship with India."

Territorial disintegration is the last thing Beijing wants. The leadership
is forever wary of the cyclical nature of Chinese history: a millennia-long
drama in which political dynasties have risen and amassed territory, until
emperors lose the "mandate from heaven" and tumble precipitously -- while
the map of China fractures into shards like a shattered vase.

Yet, despite this looming risk, the key principle underlying China's
minority policy -- the idea that the Communist Party and the country's
political elite are capable of judging for minorities what is in their best
interests -- hasn't changed since Mao. Examining that assumption could lead
to deeper systemic questioning, which Beijing dearly wants to avoid.

"A fundamental tenet of China's governing philosophy is that the Communist
Party leaders are supposed to represent the interests of the country as a
whole, without distinction," says Gardner Bovingdon, professor of East Asian
and Eurasian studies at Indiana University. "The idea that there could be
legitimate sectarian interests, which may have different or even conflicting
objectives, is one that the Communist Party does not want to touch."

Unfortunately, Beijing may not have the option of plugging its ears to
minority dissatisfaction for much longer.

In particular, the influx of Han settlers into China's ethnically diverse
western regions is creating a volatile dynamic not present in China's
eastern megacities, where the population is more homogenous. Western
urbanization has thrust new groups together, but not made new neighbors into
friends. Mutual distrust is the norm, and there are racially charged insult
matches in Internet chat rooms and in the streets. Han Chinese claim the
minorities are living better than before, with access to new roads,
hospitals, and other infrastructure -- which is true. Minorities meanwhile
claim that recent Han arrivals are living much better than they are, while
inequality is growing fast -- also true. (According to the Asian Development
Bank, Xinjinag exhibits the greatest level of inequality of any region in
China.)

In Urumqi and Lhasa, where the two most bloody riots in China's recent
history have occurred in the past 18 months, one of the most striking
features is the absolute separateness with which the minority populations
and the recent Han arrivals coexist -- and the obvious economic disparity. A
common reference point for the situation is the American South prior to the
Civil Rights movement. "In some of these large western cities, the situation
looks a lot like the American segregated South -- people living alongside
each other in radically different conditions, not really communicating,"
says Charles Freeman, a China scholar at the Center for Strategic and
International Studies. "Tensions are easy to kindle."

Moreover, the political system is not set up to protect minorities from
abuse. By law, the governor of these autonomous regions must be a member of
the relevant minority group. But the person who fills that position is
selected by the political establishment -- and so owes his career and
primary allegiance to the powers that be. As Bovington observes, "Most
minority officials rise by association with powerful Han counterparts; they
are clearly selected for their early appreciation of the Communist Party."
It's little surprise that minority cadres produced by this system have not
become champions for minority interests, but risk-averse politicians.

(Beijing has even taken it upon itself to appoint a loyal Tibetan to be the
11th incarnation of the Panchen Lama, which of course fails entirely to
satisfy the religious preconditions of the position. As one Tibetan monk at
a monastery in Yunnan told me, "Of course he's a fake. How can the
government know what is in his heart? You can't 'hire' a lama.")

Overzealous Han security forces frequently take advantage of the lax
oversight to bully ethnic minorities. As one Uighur told me after our visit
to a village mosque in southwest Xinjiang was interrupted by an unannounced
inspection by two Han police officers (my Uighur friend, intimidated,
insisted we leave in a hurry), "I don't like police. They are always rude
and rough."

Another Uighur, a schoolteacher in Kashgar, told me: "Our schools need to
improve, and we need government support. But bribery skims off the top of
any money devoted to minorities. Let's say Hu Jintao says that 10 million
renminbi should be given to us. Then, at every layer, the leader takes some,
and then the next leader takes some. So in the end we get only 1 million. No
one watches the money or makes sure we get our due."

With economic disparity and discrimination on the rise in the autonomous
regions, ethnic relations are becoming increasingly combustible. The
inability of Beijing's policies to address these issues, as Thompson puts
it, "is a governance problem. What kinds of bottom-up mechanisms exist for
minorities to express themselves or exercise checks and balance? The answer
is very few. ... Right now, violence is one of the few options." Beijing
should be hoping that its ethnic minorities find other means of expressing
their concerns. A peaceful movement for equality could be monumentally
beneficial, both for minorities and for all of China. "To have a harmonious
society, in my view, China should have a civil rights movement," said Cheng
Li, a senior fellow at the Brooking Institution's John L. Thornton China
Center.

But a movement needs leaders, and at the moment Beijing is doing its best to
handicap or discredit any leaders who might be chosen by minorities to
represent their own interests, such as the Dalai Lama or Rebiya Kadeer. "I
do not see signs of a civil right movement emerging," says Li, "of leaders
emerging who will think this way." The problem lies with the system, which
is aimed at training a small class of minority elites to be loyal to the
party, not cultivating voices who express a new point of view.

It's not a happy predicament -- either for minorities or the
stability-obsessed government in Beijing. Hu Jintao may not relish the
prospect of allowing the emergence of China's Martin Luther King Jr. But,
given that ethnic tensions are only likely to grow worse under the current
system, he might soon be facing something more explosive -- a reckoning with
China's Malcolm X.